Current efforts in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) long term evolution (LTE) program aim to bring new technology, new architecture, and new methods to provide improved spectral efficiency, reduced latency, and better utilization of radio resource to bring faster user experiences and richer applications and services with lower cost. Enabling the traditional commercially viable wireless services, especially the short message service (SMS), would greatly enhance the acceptance of the LTE technology in the wireless service product market.
In the current LTE specification, the SMS service is either not fully defined or it depends on the Internet protocol (IP) multimedia service (IMS) based SMS service or the circuit switched (CS) fallback methodology, such that the overhead of development cost is large, the network service interactions are complex and the transport efficiency is low. For supplementary services (SS) in LTE, the supportability has yet to be defined and enabled.
It would be desired to provide methods and apparatus that enable SMS and SS in LTE with implementation and backbone routing simplicity, while achieving overall data transport efficiency.